While the first season of Amazon's acclaimed Fallout TV show was set in California around the ruins of Los Angeles and Season 2 prominently featured the Mojave Wasteland and the city of New Vegas, it's been revealed that at originally, its writers wanted to do New Vegas from the get go.
That revelation comes from Todd Howard, executive producer and game director at Fallout developer Bethesda Game Studios. Howard says he told the showrunners to hold off on going to New Vegas until "the base" of the series' story was established, as the setting — the primary location that Fallout: New Vegas took place in — is "tricky" and a "minefield" due to all the events that previously happened there, and because Obsidian Entertainment's 2010 entry is widely considered the best Fallout game.
"The writers really wanted to go to New Vegas. They actually wanted to go there in the early early pitches of Season 1, and I said, 'I would save that. That's such an iconic thing for Fallout — let's establish the base, and then we can go to New Vegas,'" he explained in a new Kinda Funny Games interview.
"And I thought they did a really really good job in taking it there because it's tricky. You have an iconic area, a beloved game, particular storylines [that] end in different ways, really strong characters...and there's a million ways to f**ck that up. And so it can be a bit of a minefield, right? And I thought they did a great job," he continued.
Howard then went on to note that Amazon and Bethesda approached the narrative of Season 2 very carefully, aiming to not "refute" any of Fallout: New Vegas' potential endings while simultaneously focusing on parts of the story that they felt it would be appropriate to "push forward." This is the "fog of war" approach that the showrunners have talked about previously.
"We spent a lot of time saying, like, 'let's not refute anything that happened in the games, but let's see if there's some areas that the writers really wanna push forward' ... I thought they did a fabulous job," he said. "And, you know, you do kinda worry about sophomore slump, you see it in some other things that you all love in entertainment, [but] fortunately people loved it, and we're on to Season 3."
Indeed, people did love it; long before the entirety of Season 2 and its New Vegas-centric story aired, it was already breaking Rotten Tomatoes records, and it's currently the highest-rated Season 2 of any live-action video game adaptation. The Fallout show overall is also now the highest rated live-action video game adaptation, beating out HBO's The Last of Us and others.
Notably, like Season 1 did back in Spring 2024, Season 2 gave the Fallout games it's based on a huge player count boost, kicking off a resurgence for the legendary RPG franchise. Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Fallout: New Vegas benefitted the most from this renaissance, though all of the games did to varying degrees.
Its popularity reinforces my belief that Bethesda and Todd Howard ultimately made the right call in saving New Vegas for Season 2, as first establishing the show's core narrative and taking time to figure out how to carry the conflicts of New Vegas forward in a fitting way undoubtedly helped the showrunners safely navigate the "minefield."
If you haven't played New Vegas yourself yet, I can't recommend it enough — both because it provides significant context for the Fallout show, and because it's a terrific game. Like all the other Fallout titles, it's playable through Xbox Game Pass on Xbox and PC.
Did Todd Howard make the right call?
Do you believe Bethesda and Todd Howard were right to tell the Fallout TV showrunners to wait until Season 2 to do New Vegas? Are you a big fan of the show? How about of the Fallout RPGs? Let me know in the comments.
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